Bagged ice may be found in most grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations and/or superstores. These bags are typically stored in freezers on the premises of such locations. A concern for most vendors of these establishments is the necessity of maintaining an adequate supply of bagged ice for their customers. Unfortunately, most establishments are not equipped with ice-making and bagging facilities or machinery and are thus forced to rely on shipments of bagged ice and consequently accept the potential delay thereof, thus adversely affecting the establishment's customer satisfaction and profit margin.
Although some establishments may be equipped with ice-making machinery, most are typically not equipped with efficient and automated ice-bagging machinery. Instead, such establishments often have on-site employees manually fill individual bags with ice and then load the individual bags into a freezer, thus resulting in a highly inefficient and potentially unsanitary process. Furthermore, bags manually filled with ice are generally not immediately placed within a freezer to maintain solid state of the ice, but are instead allowed to sit for a period of time on the floor or in a basket or container where bridging/fusing of the ice results as a consequence of the ice melting. As such, a customer purchasing manually filled bags of ice is often burdened with having to break a large clump or block of ice into useable pieces. Bags of ice shipped or trucked to a grocery store are also subject to bridging during transport of the ice bags from the delivery truck to inside the store and then into the store's freezers.
Facilities that possess presently available ice making, bagging and storing machine are still at a disadvantage, as the technology of prior-art machines has generally remained inefficient, thereby adversely affecting profitability. In particular, most prior-art machines require augers to channel and physically transport ice produced by the icemaker to a reservoir for subsequent bagging. As such augers are typically slow in transporting the ice to the reservoir and fail to incorporate drainage mechanisms to assist in the channeling away of melting ice, unwanted bridging/fusing of ice particles results, and as such, utilization and incorporation of such augers is disadvantageous. Furthermore, because such machinery may bag ice based on weight of the collected ice within the reservoir, fused clumps of ice are often deposited into the bags when the required weight of ice, clumped or not, has been met. Consequently, the slow speed and inefficiency of machinery incorporating such augers directly impacts the number of bags of ice that can be produced and, as such, has a direct and negative impact on sales volume and profit of the establishment utilizing the machinery.
Moreover, prior-art ice making, bagging and storing machines that incorporate hoppers for receipt of ice from the icemaker, typically do not possess an agitator in the hopper to assist in breaking up and/or agitating the ice particles/cubes so as to prevent bridging. As a result, bags of ice yielded from these prior art machines generally contain fused clumps of ice particles/cubes, thereby inconveniencing the purchaser/customer by requiring him/her to break apart the chunks of ice into smaller useable pieces.
Therefore, it is readily apparent that there is a need for an ice-bagging apparatus that provides an establishment with the ability to automatically and continuously produce, bag and store bags of non-bridged ice without the need of manual labor and/or continuous monitoring of the machinery.